I am currently setting up a 4.8 m dish for pulsar Observation and besides other receivers I would ike to use the RSP2 as well.

I know that this will be a very, very demanding task, however backed by a study of radio astronomy in the late 70ies and 35 yrs of experience in the space industry (physicist, phd.), it should be possible to realise such a projekt.

Thanks very much in advance for comments and do not hesitate to contact me via my email address: vkgroebi{at}aol.com.

Since people are even using RTL-SDR dongles for pulsar detection, sensitivity and receiver noise figure (oddly) doesn't seem to be of much a concern. The RSP2 has lower receiver noise, better sensitivity and you can utilize a bandwidth of 8 (or even 10) MHz which I think is better than a 2.4 MHz baseband recording for processing.

It would be great if you'd keep us posted on that, I'm quite interested in that matter myself but totally clueless, currently reading this quite good writeup:

So whats the hard part about doing this? Is it building the antenna? Finding a RF quiet location? Making software that works? I imagine you would use that linux based receiver software that are like modulals or building blocks to make the receiver software. Does anyone know what thats called? They featured it on Hak5 but as usual they don't post the second half of the video. I totally stopped watching that channel as literally every project I'm interested in has a two part video where the good stuff is in the second part but they never publish it. They say go to their site since they won't post part 2 on you tube because they are fascists. Anyways the commie bastards featured a software that lets you build exactly what you need in your receiver software. In their demonstration they created a waterfall. Can't remember for the life of me what it was called. Please keep this site up to date that sounds extremely interesting and would love to try this down the road someday, in the mean time anyways to remote a raspberrypi3 into your SDRPlay to control from another PC?

Cool idea - I remember back in the '90s setting up an impromptu "radio telescope" with my (college) radio club. We set up a shortwave receiver to listen at ~20.5MHz (if I recall correctly) when the comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 was going to impact Jupiter. We used a simple antenna - a wire dipole with two reflector-wires underneath it - and got good results. We set up a Sun SPARCstation to digitize the audio from the receiver and do two things - #1 was to log the [averaged] noise level once per minute to a file, and the other was to capture full audio files of any period of time in which there was anything other than "regular noise" in the audio stream. Our algo for "other than regular noise" yielded a lot of local (earthly) noise - both natural and man-made - so we had to delete the irrelevant audio cap's every day or two to prevent our hard-drive from filling up, but we did get data and audio which were unique to the series of impacts as they occurred.

With and SDR and a couple of TB hard-drives you could do an awful lot of wideband data collection - creating synthetic apertures in both the time and frequency domain, which would eliminate 99.99% of non-celestial noise. It would be very interesting to give this a try, and it's now on my list of future projects...

I have some involvement with the SDRPlay and amateur radio astronomy. Some observers in the Radio Jove project are using the SDRPlay 1 to capture beautiful spectrograms of Jupiter and solar emissions. Jupiter's storm signals top off at 40MHz but there are lots of things to do over the entire frequency range of the SDRPLay. One possibility is interferometry using locked clocks between receivers. A hydrogen line telescope is just an LNA and small dish away. If interested look at my blog at [url]cugnusa.blogspot.com[/url] or website at http://radiosky.com . The spectrograph software is free. It allows you to save just the reduced power over up to 512 channels and about 10 frames/sec. This is a manageable (but large) amount of data as opposed to saving IQ data which is just impractical for long periods.